Voting Is Peaceful in South Sudan Despite Border Clashes

Long lines formed Sunday at polling places in Juba, in southern Sudan, for a referendum on independence. The voting, which will continue through the week, was reported to be going smoothly.Credit
Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

JUBA, Sudan — As voters continued flooding the polls on Monday for a landmark referendum on southern Sudan’s independence, officials said more than 40 people had been killed over the weekend in intense skirmishes in a contested area along Sudan’s north-south border.

The voting, which began Sunday, is proceeding jubilantly and remarkably smoothly, with high expectations and few serious complaints anywhere across southern Sudan. But if the referendum passes and the south breaks off from the north, the disputed border will become the next issue to resolve, and some fear that the specter of an all-out border war is rising.

Abyei, where skirmishes broke out Friday and Saturday, is considered the most combustible and intractable of all the disputed areas. Both the north and the south claim historical ties to it and are refusing to budge. Some Western analysts have called Abyei “Sudan’s Jerusalem.”

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Southern Sudanese, some dressed in their Sunday best, waved voting cards and Bibles in Juba.Credit
Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

Most people here in Juba, the southern capital, were unaware of the rising tensions along the border, which is several hundred miles away. Voters continued to pour into polling places on Monday, to dance, whistle and sing, and to talk excitedly about how secession will bring new bridges, new roads, new schools, new hospitals, new jobs, even new food.

Thabo Mbeki, the former South African president who is in Sudan observing the election, said the sky-high hopes reminded him of the 1960s, when so many Africans broke free from their colonial masters. “The great excitement of liberation comes with high expectations,” he said. The trick, he added, will be meeting them.

The biggest challenge southern Sudan will face, he said, is avoiding the same pitfall that plunged Sudan into civil war decades ago: unequal development.

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Fighting broke out over the weekend in Abyei, a disputed area.Credit
The New York Times

Though the north-south civil war has often been simplified as a battle between the Christian and animist south versus Arab rulers in the north, the south itself is very diverse. It is home to Christians, animists and Muslims; scores of ethnic groups and dozens of languages; traditional people whose lives revolve around cows and more modern people who worship cash.

“They have to manage this diversity carefully, giving all the groups a sense of belonging,” said Mr. Mbeki, who has been the lead mediator between the north and the south on separation. “If not, you will get the same fractures that took place in the whole of Sudan in south Sudan.”

Around Abyei, those fractures have already become violent. According to elders of the nomadic Misseriya people, who roam the Abyei area and are aligned with the Sudanese government in Khartoum, southern soldiers shelled their camps, slaughtered their cattle and killed more than 10 civilians over the weekend.

“I just buried 13 of my people,” said Sadig Babo Nimir, a Misseriya leader who spoke by telephone from Khartoum.

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Salva Kiir, the president of southern Sudan, which has been semi-autonomous since a peace treaty was signed in 2005, cast his ballot Sunday morning as the polls opened.Credit
Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

In retaliation, the Misseriya attacked southern Sudanese security officers, killing several and capturing their gun trucks and weapons, Mr. Sadig said. “As Misseriya, we don’t want anything but peace,” he added. “We are just defending ourselves.”

Southern officials tell a different story. Philip Aguer, spokesman for the southern military, said that the Misseriya attacked police officers first and that the nomads “are not moving with cattle, they are moving with machine guns.” He said the Misseriya had been armed by the Khartoum government to “disrupt the referendum.”

Despite fears of mounting tensions, southern Sudan may surprise its doubters. In a way, it already has. After all the doomsday talk and fretting about whether the south was capable of holding the referendum, or whether it would be delayed or chaotic, voting seems to be going well. Thousands of people lined up once again before dawn on Monday, though the crowds in Juba were not nearly as large as on Sunday.

This is a country where more than three-quarters of adults cannot read, but at polling places there is a methodical system for checking voter identification cards, handing out ballots, creasing them and tucking them into a plastic tub. It is slow going, taking up to seven minutes per voter in some places, which means the last person in line can wait all day, often under an unforgiving sun. But “better than expected” seems to be the mantra among foreign election observers.

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Southern Sudanese poured into polling stations on Sunday morning to cast their votes in a historic referendum on southern Sudan’s independence.Credit
Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

“I’m pretty impressed, actually,” said J. Scott Gration, President Obama’s special envoy to Sudan, one observer here. “If things go the way they are going, I see no reason why we shouldn’t be able to have a referendum where the outcome is credible.”

That outcome will most likely be an overwhelming vote for secession, which means Sudan will then begin the delicate process of splitting in two and a new, poor, landlocked and very hopeful nation will soon be born.

“Yeah, I’ve heard this a lot, ‘I’m voting to be free and then all my problems will be over,’ ” laughed Valentino Achak Deng, whose nightmarish experience as a refugee was the subject of the best seller “What Is the What.”

“The government will have a lot to face,” he said. After the referendum passes and independence is declared in July, as predicted, “There will be a lot of complaining. I wouldn’t rule out demonstrations. People don’t understand how young nations start and what it means to build a country from scratch.”

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The lines were packed, thousands of people long, and many voters had been standing in place since 2 a.m.Credit
Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

It is not only southern Sudanese who are excited by all this. Other separatist regions in Africa, and there are many of them — the Ogaden in Ethiopia; Western Sahara; the Cabinda enclave of Angola and the breakaway region of Somaliland, to name a few — may be encouraged to push harder for independence now that the African Union and Western powers have made an exception to their longstanding distaste for redrawing borders.

Western diplomats say Somaliland probably has the strongest case to be recognized as a nation, because it is the most democratic part of Somalia and is an oasis of stability in the war-ravaged country. This summer, Somaliland held a legitimate election in which the incumbent president lost and gracefully handed over power to the opposition, a rarity in Africa considering the disputed elections in Ivory Coast, Kenya, Zimbabwe and elsewhere.

Somaliland representatives were in Juba, trying to buttonhole Western and African dignitaries and plead for recognition of Somaliland. “I’m encouraged,” said Abdillahi M. Duale, a former Somaliland government minister, who met with Mr. Mbeki this past week. “What’s happening here in South Sudan is going to help us.”

Sudan Offers to Take On Debt

KHARTOUM, Sudan (AP) — Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, has offered to relieve the south of any debt burden if it votes for independence by assuming the whole $36 billion national debt.

The offer appears to be a good-will gesture. The statement from the president’s office, however, said Sudan’s debt should be scrapped and was the “responsibility of the north, south and the international community.”

Josh Kron contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on January 11, 2011, on page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: Despite Skirmishes, Sudan Vote Is Peaceful. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe